Reimagining Policing: A New Vision for Communities and Law Enforcement

This episode of Beyond the Bandaids is brought to you by Project PACT (Police And Community Together).

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Connect with the co-hosts of Beyond the Bandaids:

Chief Mike Butler on LinkedIn
Dr. Carol Engel-Enright on LinkedIn
Kristin Daley on LinkedIn

The following three organizations—each committed to enhancing community well-being and policing integrity—joined forces to create Project PACT.

Law Enforcement Action Partnership (LEAP)
New Blue
The School of Statesmanship, Stewardship & Service (SOSSAS)

Beyond the Bandaids is dedicated to exploring how police officers, public safety professionals, community leaders, and community members can reconnect with their sense of purpose and inspire positive change in their local community.

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This episode was produced by Story On Media & Marketing: https://www.successwithstories.com

[Carol Engel-Enright] (0:00 – 1:10)
Welcome to Beyond the Band-Aids, a podcast about police and community together, taking action to work together to create healthy communities, the well-beingness of all society, and just talk about current issues. I’m Dr. Carol England Wright. I’m an academic researcher.

My role here is kind of the facilitator between how we think about the future. I come from a design thinking, research point of view, how we create something that’s greater than what we have today. I also come from a study in the social sciences of ethnography, phenomenology, and I have had the pleasure of working with Mike Butler, who’s been chief of police in our community for 26 years.

I’m going to turn it over to Mike for a quick introduction, and then to Kristen, and then we’ll get started on the reimagining policing, thinking about the future.

[Mike Butler] (1:11 – 2:07)
Thank you, Carol, and good day, everybody. I am Mike Butler. I was the public safety chief in our community for 25 plus years, a community of Longmont, Colorado, a town of about 100,000, quite diverse, about 35 miles north of Denver.

I left the community, I left the city, I hanged that role back in July of 2020, and have since been part of founding a new non-profit called the School of Statesmanship, Stewardship, and Service, SOSES, and also part of this great project, Project PACT. And really happy to be here, really happy to have the conversations I’m having with Carol and Kristen, who I both greatly admire and respect, in terms of creating a different kind of future for what the role of police can be and what the role of community can be in terms of enhancing safety in our community. So I’m going to turn it over to Kristen.

[Kristin Daley] (2:07 – 2:31)
Hi, everyone. I’m Kristen Daly. I’ve spent 17 years in police policy change.

I’m also a victim advocate, training police in trauma-informed and survivor-centric best practices, and I’m the current executive director of New Blue, which is a national incubator for police and community collaboration and creating solutions that build trust within communities.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (2:32 – 3:50)
So this podcast comes to you as a collaboration of three non-profits that are working in this area, SOSES, School of Statesmanship, Law Enforcement LEAP, Law Enforcement Action Partnership, and New Blue. And we’re excited about Project PACT because we think that there can be a different future than what we hear today. The narrative in the media is that the police industry, industry professional part of the police is broken.

And we think it’s stuck, that it is stuck in maybe some traditions, some culture from the past that we can move into some training and some rethinking and some mindsets that take it into the future. Now, it’s not just the police, it’s the communities that they serve. So we’re speaking to all of you to take action, to work on how you’re thinking.

So Mike, I want to talk about this police profession. You’ve been in the profession for most of your adult life, all of your adult life in one way or another in different agencies. Talk about the police profession and why you feel it’s stuck right now.

[Mike Butler] (3:50 – 6:16)
Well, I liked what you said, Carol, in terms of broken. I think we tend to kind of address things as problems that need to be fixed. And we’re not addressing the police as a problem to be fixed.

We believe that there’s a lot of incredible things going on in our policing profession that we want to see more of, that we want to see expanded, that we want to see become more part of the culture within a police department. And so, but we are stuck. The police department is stuck.

And hence the reason for this podcast, Beyond the Band-Aids. We’ve been kind of applying band-aids to our stuckness, if you will, in terms of, well, let’s add a new program, or let’s change the technology, or let’s do something around policies that are maybe outdated, or let’s change the, let’s reorganize the deck chairs on the ship, let’s just kind of redo the architecture, or let’s maybe one of the more popular ones, let’s just change police chiefs and everything will be better. And so those things have all been tried. And I go back to August of 14, 2014, when Ferguson occurred, Ferguson, Missouri.

And so we’ve had several incidents since then that have put certain cities on people’s radar. But we’ve been applying band-aids. And so what Project PACT is about is how to really in-depthly deal with cultures that police departments have and communities have.

And by the way, I don’t think we can reform the police or our community until the police are reformed. Paradoxically, I don’t think we can reform the police until the community is reformed. And so there’s a simultaneous kind of approach that has to occur.

And so one can’t move forward without the other. The community can’t move forward without the police. The police can’t move forward without the community.

So a big part of Project PACT is understanding the relationship that exists between community and police, and how to make that a healthy relationship so that both the community and police can move forward.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (6:16 – 7:16)
Okay. So in previous podcasts, we’ve talked a lot about people may or may not understand the structure of police. It comes from city municipalities.

Each one has a charter. And then within that charter, the police department works into city government. And Kristen, you’ve been in the field researching for a long time and working with a lot of people in the field right now in New Blue.

So let’s go into idealism. I’m sure you’ve heard from some of the officers that are in your cohorts, you know, I got into this profession because I wanted to help people. I think as a professor, I heard that from students all the time.

I want to do something that helps people. So let’s talk about this idealism. And then what happens when it suddenly disappears?

[Kristin Daley] (7:17 – 9:12)
Absolutely. I mean, I think if you asked almost any police officer, they would say they got into policing to help people and to make their communities better. And I think, and I have a little bit of a different take on whether the system is broken or stuck.

I think no matter what word we use there, we do have to acknowledge that the system is not working for everyone. And that includes police officers themselves and community members. You know, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with acknowledging that there are bad actors working within the system, but there are also a lot of good people working within the system who do have that idealism and who do want to push for change and who do want to amplify what is working well and, you know, move the good forward.

So I think when we talk to police officers in New Blue, they almost across the board say, we got into this to help people. And they’re also okay with acknowledging that the system has not worked for every community or every police officer. And I think what’s most important about a program like New Blue or like Project PACT is that we are giving those police officers who are amplifying the good, a platform and a network to collaborate with each other.

We are creating, you know, it’s hard to be the one person who stands up and says, I want to make a change. And if you have a network of people who are standing with you, it becomes much easier. So I think it’s okay to acknowledge that the system isn’t working well.

And the status quo isn’t working well. But we don’t have anything to lose by letting things stay the way they are and letting the system keep running. That’s not true.

We do have the opportunity to make it stronger, to make it better and to get it out of that place of being stuck.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (9:13 – 10:01)
Okay, so huge topic. All institutions are up against this right now. And you hear the words reform.

You don’t hear transform very often. Mike, I’m going to go to you, because you walked into a department that was very much, people would have said broken at the time the system was there. How did you bring your idealism as a chief into a department and start to shift, start to allow the idealism of all of your officers to surface, to activate this into this goodness, this hopefulness, this encouragement?

[Mike Butler] (10:02 – 13:24)
See, that’s a great question, Carol. And, you know, part of how I see whether it’s people, organizations or communities, is let’s start with the people. And in terms of, do I see them through the lens of their deficiencies?

Do I see them as problems to be solved? Do I see them as broken? Or do I see them as there’s something good that may be latent?

Maybe they just haven’t had a chance or an opportunity to kind of express what’s good within them. And so through the nature of the conversations I had, through the communication that I provided throughout the whole department, the whole community, and one-on-one conversations, one-on-group conversations, one-with-all-hands conversations, everybody in the organization, whatever that might look like, I always acknowledge that the possibilities of people, I always acknowledge their goodness and always acknowledge their gifts.

Conversations that we don’t have a lot of in terms of we acknowledge, well, here’s the problem to be solved, or here’s what’s broken about either people, organizations or communities, and we’re going to fix these things. And so it’s how we approach, whether it’s people, organizations, communities, countries, or a planet, in terms of how do we approach it as having unlimited capacity, or do we approach it as a person, people, organizations, as people who are limited, air-prone, and need to be fixed. And so Project PACT is coming from the perspective that there is goodness there, that there are good things happening, that there are things we want to see more of, there are things we want to see expanded.

And how do we do that in a way that eventually crowds out the things that we don’t want to see? And that worked, by the way. I want to say, without very few exceptions, that worked within a police department.

That works for all of us in terms of if we think about the psychology and sociology of those kinds of conversations, we’re having conversations around gifts, what we’re grateful for, what goodness does exist. It doesn’t mean that we’re ignoring the problems. It doesn’t mean that we’re trying to fix some things that need to be taken care of.

Those are always there for us. But if we think in terms of possibilities of what kind of future we can create, that’s a different set of conversations, and those are different sets of actions. And so ultimately, over time, I would say within three to four or five years, people began to kind of reframe their conversations.

And not only within the organization, but between them and the community. And so we began to see the community less as a problem to be solved and more as a possibility. And so I just stuck with that.

And to this very moment, I mean, I’ve been living my life that way for decades. And so I just brought that aspect of my life into the organization, into this community for the length of time that I did. And over time, things did shift.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (13:25 – 14:39)
Yeah. Beautiful. You know, I love that you’re talking people.

So much of when I think of people talking about systems, they say, oh, processes, or they are into facilities or structure or data in today’s world. Let’s just gain the data. But they rarely talk about putting the assets into the people.

They might send somebody for training, but often it’s around new equipment. So let’s talk to Project PACT and how we’re approaching this from a little bit different viewpoint of how we’re available to work and collaborate. I love that you both said collaborate.

You talked about shared knowledge, shared understanding, and bringing that to the whole department, not just to the head of a department and then they take it in, but really working together, the networks of people that work together between community. And Kristen, talk about some of what you’re doing with New Blue and then how you see Project PACT taking some of the SOSUS training and forward and working with both police and community.

[Kristin Daley] (14:40 – 16:39)
Sure. So every officer who comes into New Blue works directly with community members, whether that’s individual activists or organizers, to create a solution to something that is not working well within their agency. But it also is very much, as Mike said, to amplify the good, to find what is working well and to put it into place within the agency.

So to me, the impact of that collaboration is really transformative, not only for the department, but for the community. And I think the impact is not isolated in that, so it ripples. Other communities nearby are going to potentially see what this officer and this community organization is doing and want to create similar change or amplify what’s working well in their communities.

And I think it will inspire other officers, other departments, and other community members. And that’s the hope we have for bringing a better collaboration into the future. I think eventually officers who do have that mindset of amplifying the good and building strong community relationships will reach a critical mass.

And that’s going to be the real momentum for change. And I think Project PACT is doing the same. We’re going into departments and talking with officers and also going into communities, talking with community members and community leaders and saying, we want to help you to create this better way forward, this collaboration where public safety doesn’t just belong to the police.

And it’s not just the absence of violence in the community. It’s the presence of well-being. And that’s what New Blue and What Leap and what Project PACT and SOSUS are all doing is making that happen for communities, collaboration and taking care of each other.

Beautiful.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (16:39 – 18:10)
Boy, I love the well-being. I love thinking about, and I’m just going to say to the listener out there, we’re just getting into this. We’re going to have a series of these, but as you listen and you go, wow, I wish our community could be like that.

Call your mayor, call your city council person, call your city manager and say, hey, listen to these podcasts because they’re talking about something new, something innovative, something that’s creative in terms of both of us coming to the table. I don’t want to bring up things of the past, but I know Mike worked with some citizens in Louisville that were activists. And then a couple of weeks ago, the consent decree came from the Department of Justice of how Louisville now police have to work for five years to correct a mistake that they made.

And I look at, they didn’t quite get to, they didn’t get to this creative kind of coming together. Mike, speak about that in terms of how the role that police can make in bringing a community, even one that’s wounded in trauma. You went through it.

You weren’t the chief at the time, but you got the after effects of that in Longmont of a traumatic tragedy that happened in this community as well. Speak to the healing.

[Mike Butler] (18:10 – 24:06)
So let me just say, I’m just going to go on the record and say, consent decrees are another bandaid. And because when you look at consent decrees, they’re typically boilerplate consent decrees all over the country. They all look the same.

They don’t address the depth of culture. They don’t necessarily address the values within an organization. They’re policy oriented, they’re procedure oriented.

But when you talk about what the role police departments are playing within communities, part of this gets into, there’s a lot of people in our communities who feel marginalized. There’s no question about that. And they don’t know whether or not they even belong to the community.

And the role, let me just back up and say that we have about a million police officers and auxiliary people in this country. And auxiliary people are the professionals within police departments, or the people who are volunteers and play somewhat of a role in terms of what happens between a police department and a community. And these million police are in our communities and in our neighborhoods 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and 365 days a year.

And there’s this incredible, in almost every community, legitimate platform for the police to make a difference in terms of helping to heal the loneliness. Now, again, I don’t want to come from the perspective of it’s all the police responsibility. It’s not.

It’s very much a community responsibility. Sometimes it’s been unfortunately given too much to the police over the years and decades. But the police can play a big role in helping people feel like and believe that they belong to our community.

We did that in Longmont in terms of helping people understand that they believe and feel they belong to our community. And we all know that this sense of belonging is powerful. It’s something that we all crave in terms of wanting to belong to something.

You’ve heard me say before that these dimensions of belonging are one of relationship. I belong to something. It is one of ownership.

And something belongs to me. The police departments, I have firsthand information and practical experience in terms of helping even some of the most marginalized people believe and feel that they can belong to their neighborhood and their community. So that’s one thing a police department can do differently than what they’re perhaps doing now.

The other thing a police department can do is help surface and activate the abundant social capital that exists in every one of our communities in terms of who are the people in the community that have these gifts, these talents, these resources, this expertise and skills to help in that healing process no matter what the social or health issue is. There are people in our community, in our community of hundreds of hundred thousand, we have tens of thousands of people in our community who have gifts. Maybe all of them have gifts.

They want to offer their gifts. They just don’t know how. And so the role that the police department can play, and we’re going to talk more about this in a future podcast, is what can a police department or an individual police officer do to encourage people to believe not only do they have gifts to offer, but that they can offer those gifts and that we can surface activate.

And that third tier of that stool is help coordinate that social capital in a way that can make a difference in the community. And then the last one I’m going to talk about, but there’s more, is this sense of, well, I’ll talk about two more. One is goodness.

Where is the goodness in the community? Where is that that can help crowd out the things that we don’t want to see? Police departments are in the catbird seat of being able to identify that.

Now, the last one I’ll talk about, but there’s more, and we’ll talk about that maybe in a future podcast around the roles that police can play in a community to help heal the woundedness. But as one of building the resilience and the self-sufficiency in neighborhoods, I’ve seen that happen over and over and over again, where police have helped neighborhoods become more self-reliant, more self-sufficient in terms of enhancing its own safety to the point where they don’t need the police anymore because they are self-sufficient and they are self-reliant. And so their calls to the police go way down, their sense of safety in our own neighborhood goes way up.

And by the way, I have not seen a neighborhood ever where that has happened, where people, that social capital and that sense of reliance and self-sufficiency is alive and well, that where crime and disorder didn’t dissipate. It may not go away completely. It may take time, but once that neighborhood feels that way about itself, then the crime and disorder tends to be minimized.

And so that is a huge and important role that police can play. And as we said last week in our podcast, the role is not to be there forever. The role is to, and the metric for effectiveness is, we’re no longer needed.

This neighborhood can take care of itself. It realizes this, it has a safety mindedness going for itself in terms of here’s how we keep ourselves safe. We don’t need to call 911.

We need to call a neighbor. And so that becomes the shift in terms of how a neighborhood thinks about itself. So I’ll leave it at that for now.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (24:08 – 25:16)
We won’t get into the art of neighboring on this podcast, but when you say we need to call a neighbor, it’s like, first you have to have their phone number, which means last podcast, we talked about saying hi to your neighbor, call to action. So Kristen, talk about some of the skills and some of the training that you’re doing, or some of the things that you’re seeing on the police side. This podcast is specific to police and re-imagining policing, the future of policing.

What do you think the skills are? I come from academic social sciences and I was working with industry and industry was often saying, you need to prepare students in the soft skills. So I would like to kind of talk around why we call them soft skills, what that means, but we have brought up the importance of considering the person that’s in the profession of policing.

So speak to some of the skills, the shifts in thinking, the shifts in attitudes and things that you’ve seen.

[Kristin Daley] (25:17 – 29:00)
Sure. That’s a big question, but a little bit earlier in the episode, you mentioned that a lot of the training that police receive focus around kind of the tactical side of things. And for me, that’s a misstep because I don’t think that the skills we’re about to talk about should be referred to as soft skills.

I think they’re really essential skills in getting the right type of officer. So imagine if instead of showing officers, you know, rappelling down a building or engaged in a chase or a SWAT team kicking down a door, we started to look at policing as officers engaged in restorative justice mediation with a community member or offering resources to someone rather than arresting them if they’re struggling with substance use, for example, or talking to a crime survivor about the reporting process with a sense of compassion. We would attract the right type of person into this job. You know, those questions, those skills are really essential in policing and they would bring a lot to departments.

As Mike said, you know, a sense of belonging is really critical, changes internal as much as it’s external in this process. So when departments start to think about valuing wellness outside of the job and valuing these soft skills and valuing the right type of officer in this role, I think that is completely transformative for police departments and for communities. So a little bit of the training that we offer in New Blue.

First of all, we walk officers through sort of the pillars that we consider for our solutions to fall into. So restorative justice, diversion and deflection is one. Recidivism reduction is another.

We also take a look at alternative response programs and community violence interruption programs. And our fourth category is called community innovation initiatives. And that’s more of a broad category for a lot of different types of programs, you know, youth or recruiting or, you know, just positive trust building within the community.

Some of the training centers on those soft skill type skills, like how do you become a leader within the community and create that trust, create those conversations, policing with a very collaborative mindset. And then, you know, how do we build skills to take these officers to the next level so that they are out there engaging with people? They are the next generation of police and leading the way forward.

I think a big part of that is creating surrounding support systems. And another big part of it is supporting creative thinking. So departments really need to try to create a culture that values open communication, that values feedback from all officers, regardless of rank or seniority, and really encouraging officers to speak up about their ideas and their concerns and what they see as potential improvements or how they bring good programs into, you know, the mainstream.

But it really needs to be from the top down and the bottom up. You know, those officers with boots on the ground need to need to be heard and recognized by leaders. And I know that that’s something Mike really focused on within his department, is creating meeting space where everyone is welcome and everyone gets to contribute.

That’s really critical to the process of how officers learn and grow.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (29:02 – 29:34)
Okay. So Mike, you’re a founder of School of Statesmanship, Stewardship, and Service. And that came from an editorial where you talked about the attributes, the characteristics.

And you talk all the time. You speak in high schools and nationwide around the attributes, these skills. What are the skills that both the police and the community want to start thinking about developing?

How do we start into this? You know, what could somebody do today that would make a difference?

[Mike Butler] (29:35 – 34:56)
Well, everyone, there’s plenty of those skills that we talk about. I just want to kind of back up a little bit and build on a little bit of what Kristen said. And to remind people that we’re just talking from a theoretical perspective.

We actually have training, instruction that’s practical, experiential, and academic that can help communities, mayors, city managers, police chiefs, police officials, police officers, and citizens, especially, navigate and learn new skills in a way that brings the things we’re talking about to life. And so I just want to make sure that people understand and know that that’s what Project PACT is capable of doing. We’re not just talking in platitudes here.

We’re actually very much, we have the substance to be able to teach, instruct, and train, and educate all the people that I mentioned in terms of how to shift your culture from a culture that’s typically dominated and kind of reflective of patriarchy to one that’s reflective of authentic partnerships. And by the way, when we talk about belonging, I was only talking about the community. One of the first things that I wanted to do was to get our staff to believe and feel they belonged to our department and that they also belong to our community.

That was a big part of the nature of conversations that I had with people. What’s that look like for police chiefs and city managers in terms of getting their staffs, both the commission staff and professional staff, to really believe and feel they belong to our community? And that’s a skill we teach, by the way.

We teach other skills like how to harmonize the contrast, how to have communication that’s not, that doesn’t breed resentment or antagonisms or self-defense, how to kind of up your skill set and your awareness and consciousness around emotional intelligence, how to see the trend lines that are happening versus just being kind of overtaken by the headlines, how to serve in a way that is, how to lead in a way that’s reflective of servant leadership, how to have conversations with people that help people choose accountability, help people choose commitment, help people to choose action, how to get people to have conversations that are more transformative, how to ask questions that are powerful in a way that gets people to that point where they don’t feel stuck in maybe the little box that they’re in, but they’re willing to explore something more.

And so how to shift and change your culture, how to change, how to transcend your culture that goes way beyond the band-aids that have been tried since, for a long time, but definitely since Ferguson. What’s that, what has to happen? What kind of conversations do you have to have?

What are the systems or processes that need to be part of this? What’s management need to do? Who’s involved with that?

As I said last week, I think I’ve said last week, our first strategic planning process included a thousand people, 800 people from the community and 200 people from the organization. And that had a lot to do with shifting culture around who’s voice counted, whose thoughts mattered, whose humanness was really valued. And once we began down that path, that was a different kind of path than the ones that I’m seeing right now in the police profession, where it’s mostly just band-aids, or there’s a lot of platitudes around here’s what needs to happen differently.

And so if people go on our SOSAS.org website, they will see a list of 45 courses that we teach, and that we’re willing to teach cities, citizens, police departments, and all the people associated with those in a way that can help them see here’s how they can move forward in a more in-depth way that’s more sustainable, that does honor and recognize the idealism that everybody has, the goodness that everybody has, because the change model we’re coming from is not one from here’s what needs to be fixed, and that’s a consent decree, by the way. Here’s the problem that needs to be fixed, but it comes from a perspective of here’s what’s good, here’s what’s working, here’s what we want to see more of. How can we expand those in a way that crowds out the things that need to be fixed?

That works. And that’s the new change model, a new frontier of change, if you will, in terms of how we need to move forward. And so we’re going to have to get out of seeing people, organizations, and communities as problems to be solved.

I don’t want to minimize the problems we have, we’re going to, but the big land is going to be towards creating a future full of possibilities where everybody’s voice counts and their thoughts matter. And so that’s what we train, that’s what we teach, that’s what we instruct, and we are incredibly excited about this possibility.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (34:57 – 36:38)
Very much so. So thank you. Boy, so many topics to get to, and I’m just sitting here thinking, okay, accountability needs to be just one podcast as we think about that.

But you brought up culture, and I just want to touch on it. People think about culture, they think about, well, this is the way we’ve always done things. This is the tradition.

And if each of you could just give a quick definition of culture, and then also speak to, you move people forward, a little bit of what’s comfortable and familiar can help people then facilitate a little more change. It’s, you know, I think when Minneapolis happened with George Floyd, I was reading this morning that everybody was like, well, defund the police, break it all down. And then immediately they put it in as a ballot initiative.

And of course, the people didn’t want to give up the assurance of protection, the assurance of having somebody that could be there in case of an emergency. But when we think about police, we have moved from like the warrior, the protector into more of a guardian, a companion, a walk with, you know, that’s what I’m hearing from both of you. So maybe speak to the culture, to what is it?

What can we look for? How does it shift things you’re seeing out there?

[Kristin Daley] (36:38 – 38:18)
So to me, culture is not just how people feel about the organization or the community, but how it makes them feel about themselves. And, you know, traditional culture in policing has not necessarily been one of belonging and encouraging collaboration. And I think that that has created distance between police and the communities they serve.

And those really shouldn’t, and I know we’ve talked about this before, those shouldn’t be two separate entities. Police are a part of the community and community should be a part of the overall vision for public safety. So to me, creating a culture of collaboration, of mutual respect and understanding, creating a culture where we really value, again, those not soft skills, like empathy and compassion and active listening, that’s really essential.

It’s also really important to think about what’s good, what’s working well. And I think the most important piece of all this is coming to the conversation, willing to listen and willing to embrace change and embrace kind of being willing to interact as human beings. It’s not about, you know, a lot of the the symbolism that we see, or it’s not about coming from two separate points of view.

It’s really about getting on the same page, wanting to see the community be safer and be well.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (38:19 – 38:31)
So are you saying there’s different cultures, like the culture that’s interdepartmental is maybe different than the culture that’s between the department, and then there’s the culture of the community itself?

[Kristin Daley] (38:31 – 38:58)
I think so. I mean, I don’t think the community necessarily has a real insight into the community, the culture within a department. I feel I think it feels very different to be working in a police department than to be a community member viewing it from the outside.

But I do think it’s important to break down those barriers and bring the community in and make it, you know, one larger collaboration.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (38:58 – 39:02)
That probably feels a little scary for a police who haven’t opened their doors.

[Mike Butler] (39:03 – 43:21)
Let me build a little bit on what Kristen said, too, because I really enjoyed what she said. But I think a lot of the focus on has been that the community doesn’t understand the police. And I get that.

Believe me, as the police public safety chief, I got that a lot of what Hollywood presented was how people saw the police in this country. And of course, we had nauseam police shows in this country, way over the top that wasn’t helpful at all in terms of trying to move forward with a culture that was different than the one we had. But I would also say that the culture that’s mirrored in a police department is the culture that’s going to be happening between the police department and the community.

If the culture is patriarchal, top down, here’s whose voice counts, here’s part of the decision making process. I will tell you what you need to do, when you need to do it, where you need to do it, how you need to do it. If that’s the culture, that’s the culture that the officers are going to represent in the community.

But if the culture is different within the police department, it’s one of collaboration, one of ownership, you can walk into a police department and say, OK, whose decisions count? Whose voice counts? Whose thoughts matter?

Who decides what the values are? Who decides, who makes, who’s part of all that can easily tell you what kind of culture you have. Now, culture can be, it’s defined by values, it’s defined by the identity, it’s defined by the roles, it’s defined by what people do day in and day out.

It’s defined by the rituals, it’s defined by the slogans, it’s defined by the symbols. They’re all part of a particular culture. And part of what we teach in Project PACT is how to identify those symbols, rituals and slogans that are kind of keeping you stuck in the culture that you’re in, keeping you stuck in the patriarchal culture or the culture that you have or the relationship that a police department has with the community.

Same thing with the community. The community has symbols, rituals and slogans that are keeping itself stuck in terms of being unhealthily dependent, so to speak, on a police department. And so we can teach organizations and communities how to transcend that stuckness, how to begin to identify your current things that are keeping you in the lethargy of tradition, if you will, and how to move beyond that tradition and custom.

You know, sometimes you think an organization that there’s 200 years of tradition unimpeded by progress sometimes in terms of what that might look like. How do you get beyond that, in a way? That’s the conversations, if we’re really going to shift cultures in our organizations and our communities.

And as I said before, you really can’t change one without changing the other. We’re going to have to do that. So there’s a lot of things, there’s a lot of moving parts, there’s a lot of aspects to that.

But I would also say that the vast majority of police chiefs that I and I would dare say today, the vast majority of city managers and mayors especially, don’t necessarily, haven’t been offered the opportunity to understand organizational development or human resource development in a way that can say, okay, I have thousands of people in this organization or hundreds of people, tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars in budget, all of these moving parts, all of these management systems.

What needs to happen in order to shift this giant boat in a way that moves from patriarchy to an authentic partnership? Those are the skill sets, the awareness and consciousness that the vast majority of police chiefs and city managers and mayors just don’t understand, haven’t been given an opportunity. Well, we’re here to say that Project PACT wants to offer that to folks in a way that will be quite meaningful in step-by-step fashion so that none of this becomes overly overwhelming for people, and we can work with any organization, any department, any community, regardless of size, to help them begin to understand the shifts that they need to make in order to transcend the cultures that they currently have.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (43:23 – 44:34)
Well, that was so well said, so well stated, so on par. I almost want to say, well, that’s a wrap for today. I just want to encourage our listeners to go to our website, projectpact.org.

There is on the website, please sign up for the newsletter. We will start monthly newsletters in the beginning of the year as these podcasts come out in the beginning of the year as well, and you will be kept up and, you know, up to date about everything that’s moving forward with this shared collaboration, this shared knowledge. Again, talk to the people in your neighborhood.

Talk to your community activists, your community leaders, your municipality elected officials, your municipality managers, and maybe take a moment to thank a policeman today. We talked earlier, what’s it like, Mike, when you’ve been dealing with tough days as a police officer when the community walks in?

[Mike Butler] (44:35 – 47:18)
Well, I have many personal experiences of people acknowledging and recognizing the work, and you’re right. Police officers, there’s hardly a day that goes by where they’re not exposed to someone else’s trauma, and some of that can very well be kind of vicarious for them as well in terms of what the police officer is going through or having been told that, you know, they’re wrong or having been part of a situation where they had to, maybe they were part of arresting somebody, two or three people, or maybe had to use force on that day and felt kind of, you know, like, I don’t know if I really like this job anymore. And when someone comes in and says, we really appreciate what you’re doing and offer, and they make offerings sometimes of food or sometimes letters or sometimes they bring up their children and say, we want you to shake the police officer’s hand and tell them hello. Those are quite moving for the vast, vast majority of police officers and will help any police officer kind of rearrange their own equilibrium, if you will, in terms of having experienced what they experienced in terms of man’s inhumanity to man, and then someone make an offering.

But I want to go further and say that’s part of this idealism, that we need to protect, we need to preserve, we need to expand and sustain. And what can police departments do to carve out what needs to be carved out from a resource perspective, from a time perspective, from an exposure or experience perspective to help their police officers see that there is a tremendous amount of good that’s going on in this community, that just because they respond to what’s not going well doesn’t mean that that’s the nature of that community. And so we really will talk about that in Project PAC in terms of saying that police departments and cities have responsibilities to ensure that their police officers, their wellness, their psychological, their intellectual, their spiritual, their emotional wellness, physical wellness is a big part of the responsibility so that we can help sustain and expand the idealism that Kirsten talked about earlier in terms of what police officers enter into the profession with, so they don’t become cynical, they don’t become, I don’t like this community anymore, so they can sustain that.

That’s something that we can do more of that police departments need to take more responsibility for.

[Kristin Daley] (47:18 – 47:31)
Oh, that’s huge. If we’re not looking out for officers’ well-being, how can we expect them to go out into the community and do the best job that they can do and treat the community well? You can’t.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (47:31 – 47:47)
Okay, we’re gonna end it on well-being for all, kind of a good thought to think about in terms of how you go through your day. And please, thank you for listening and we hope you’ll come back for the next episode of Beyond the Band-Aids.